Giant Thief by David Tallerman

Easie Damasco is caught stealing and sent to war. He manages to escape, taking a giant named Saltlick and some other items with him, mostly out of habit since he is a thief by trade. Unfortunately, Easie does not realize the full significance of the items he has stolen, and he is forced to run for his life. Fortunately, he hadn’t intended to fight in the battle anyway.

David Tallerman’s Giant Thief is an amusing rogue’s tale, and Easie is just the sort of hero that one might expect from a rogue’s tale: clever and not above bending the rules and the truth to get ahead. My favorite parts of Easie’s story are his wry observations about his circumstances. For example, although everyone thinks Easie Damasco is just a small part of a bigger picture, he maintains that he is a big part of a picture just slightly larger than he is. His cleverness — not to... Read More

Crossed Genres, a magazine published online, digitally and in print, has a unique approach to genre fiction: every month it chooses a genre and requires that the stories it publishes that month combine the chosen genre with some aspect of science fiction or fantasy. Issue 27 offers a mash-up of science fiction and fantasy with tragedy. Surprisingly, none of the five short stories uses the traditional tragic element of a hero with a fatal flaw, which would seem tailor-made for SF and fantasy. Instead, the writers simply write stories that end in sadness.

“Nadirah Sends Her Love” by Ada Milenkovic Brown is the most imaginative of the stories. It takes the form of letters from Nadirah to Azim, her husband, in Hijiri Year 1432 -- or, as westerners figure time, 2011. In this world, the Arab nations continued to grow and develop their scientific acumen, ... Read More

Issue 129 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies opens with a tale by Alec Austin and Marissa Lingen entitled “On the Weaponization of Flora and Fauna.” Told in a faux-19th-century style, this piece is about characters who live in a foreign and wild colonial land to which their king has recently been exiled. New fauna and flora are being discovered daily, and exploration and discovery are the pastimes of the nobility, who have as their servants the native peoples of the land they now occupy. The only somewhat original aspect to this tale is that a woman is the protagonist, an explorer and a naturalist in her own right, as well as one who is canny in the ways of politics and war. Overall, it’s a disappointingly stale story.

The second story is better: “The Goblin King’s Concubine” by Raphael Ordoñez. It begins with the destruction of a crew of mutineers on a ship of exploration, leaving only Cap... Read More